Like is a special comparison operator that can be used to compare two text values. The comparison is case sensitive (see also Note below. You can use wildcards on the right side of the operator to define a pattern to be matched:

To match one of the wildcard characters, precede the character with a backslash (\).

These examples are based on the Museum sample data set and show how you would use the LIKE operator in mrScriptBasic or mrScriptMetadata. In SQL queries, enclose text strings in ' ' (single quotation marks) and not " " (double quotation marks).

address is a text variable that records respondents' addresses. The Like operator in this example compares whether the value in the variable contains the text "London" in any position. For example, you could use this expression to select respondents who have the word "London" anywhere in their address. However, note that this expression would include respondents who live, for example, in London House in New York and would exclude respondents who have London spelled with any other combination of upper and lower case characters (such as LONDON or london) or misspelled (such as Londoon).

Notice that the percent sign has been removed from the end of the pattern. The expression now selects respondents only if the word “London” is at the end of their address. In fact there are no respondents who have the word “London” at the end of their address in the Museum sample, because all of the London addresses end with the area code.

Now the pattern has been changed to include an underscore wildcard followed by the letter “S” and the percent wildcard. The underscore wildcard matches any single character, so this expression selects respondents who have the word “London” followed by an upper case “S” with any one character in between. For example, this expression would select respondents with the following addresses:

However, it would not select respondents with the following addresses:

The first of these is excluded because there are two characters between the word “London” and the character “S”. The second is excluded because the “s” is not uppercase.